text: The invention of antibody phage display revolutionised antibody drug discovery. Initial work was done by laboratories at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Greg Winter and John McCafferty), the Scripps Research Institute (Richard Lerner and Carlos F. Barbas) and the German Cancer Research Centre (Frank Breitling and Stefan Dübel). In 1991, The Scripps group reported the first display and selection of human antibodies on phage. This initial study described the rapid isolation of human antibody Fab that bound tetanus toxin and the method was then extended to rapidly clone human anti-HIV-1 antibodies for vaccine design and therapy.
  Phage display of antibody libraries has become a powerful method for both studying the immune response as well as a method to rapidly select and evolve human antibodies for therapy. Antibody phage display was later used by Carlos F. Barbas at The Scripps Research Institute to create synthetic human antibody libraries, a principle first patented in 1990 by Breitling and coworkers (Patent CA 2035384), thereby allowing human antibodies to be created in vitro from synthetic diversity elements.
  Antibody libraries displaying millions of different antibodies on phage are often used in the pharmaceutical industry to isolate highly specific therapeutic antibody leads, for development into antibody drugs primarily as anti-cancer or anti-inflammatory therapeutics. One of the most successful was adalimumab, discovered by Cambridge Antibody Technology as D2E7 and developed and marketed by Abbott Laboratories. Adalimumab, an antibody to TNF alpha, was the world's first fully human antibody to achieve annual sales exceeding $1bn.